Portrait of the Sister as Phantom Limb

We had trained her well; she became whoever we needed her
to be, the ballast for me & for my bloody knees, my
Allegory of the Hardy Weed.

 ♦

In families like ours, there were always two kids—
the way tables came equipped with pepper & salt,
the way coffee was served with sugar & cream.

 ♦

These children arrived, symmetrical accessories:
one for each parent’s lap & the bucket backseats
of the family sedan in the neighborhood caravan.

 ♦

I saw her then as someone lucky, she who had
colored over the blueprints of her birth, evading acne &
embarrassment & the decade’s pandemic of at-home Ogilvie perms.

 ♦

I mourned her also, missing witness to a crime, the chalk
outline of her fragile body-shadow crouching behind mine:
desperate accomplice in biding our mutual time.

 ♦

Sometimes still, the sight of disheveled cushions or a partial
glass of wine reminds me of this figure I never see but feel;
her prolific absence following me, from the orphaning of adolescence,

 ♦

through the galleries of acquiescence, to the Family Portrait,
where I stand alone with the strangers who raised me—their crucible,
their cornerstone: begrudging bearer of their weighty, singular world.

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Confluences

After collaborating on the autobiographies of some of the world’s most famous subjects, Peter Knobler turns towards home and writes about memory, music, and his mother. “When I was growing up we had spent many Sunday mornings in our Greenwich Village home listening to Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers—records that now sat on her shelves like tablets.”